Low-Cost Sensing for Environmental Sustainability

Monitoring, understand, and being aware of pollutants are key steps in improving environmental sustainability, one of the grand challenges of our time. We contribute by presenting how low-cost sensing improves our understanding and awareness of environmental pollution by increasing coverage and resolution of available information, paving the way toward solutions that improve environmental sustainability. We first present a high-level vision of how pervasive sensing can capture information of wide range of pollutants and challenges encountered in our research. We then highlight the potential of low-cost sensing to address environmental sustainability and challenges in adopting low-cost sensing through three use cases drawn from our existing and ongoing research, including littering, urban air quality, and marine plastics. We also reflect on key research issues for low-cost sensing and future directions with the dual aim of highlighting an important emerging research area and paving the way toward future research in this field.